by Shruti Swamy
School was school; she didn’t suffer. But the day had a tomorrow-feeling, Vidya thought, as she entered the flat. As usual, she looked to the Mother, but the flat was empty. Was she hiding? Of course not: that possibility would be even odder than the one she was facing, she and the Brother, who held her hand. They were both hungry so she climbed up on a stool and pulled the bhakhari tin off from the top shelf. The Brother was all scuffed up from rough play, but looked somehow clean because of his eyes, his large wet eyes that never seemed to blink, as though he didn’t want to miss a second of the world, so awful and astonishing. Sometimes when he looked at her with those eyes she felt like slapping him, to hurt him first.
Perhaps an hour passed. The tomorrow-feeling squirreled around in her gut. She wiped their plates, and washed the boy’s hands and face. What was he up to at school? The neighbor boys had little interest in him: he was still too little and they had no time for babies. There was the hope that he would grow up to be charming. For her it was too late, she was not charming, but it was irrelevant: she was not a boy. He could be smart, smarter than her, or good, better. He seemed good. He did everything he was told to. He let himself be kissed and petted but didn’t seem to enjoy it, or at least, if he enjoyed it he didn’t let it show. For a baby it was difficult to read his face.
Not a baby. He looked like one—plump and soft like a baby with his large features, his large eyes. Her friends from school cooed over him. She understood the pain of being a doll but would have made him into one anyway if he had been a girl, and she could have combed his hair very sharply and mocked him. Still, there were games they could play together. It was easy to say, “I’m Rani of Jhansi and you are my soldier,” though it had been a little time since she had taken up such a game with him; she was getting too old. He looked up with surprise from the playthings in his hands—the knotted rag doll that had once been hers, a long wooden spoon the Mother allowed him when she was not cooking. He was so small—did he too notice the tomorrow-feeling?
“I’m Rani of Jhansi,” she said. “Come, soldier! We depart for battle.”
He followed her around the empty flat, brandishing his wooden spoon. After a while, she began to forget the tomorrow-feeling: they came into a nonsense world, inarticulable to outsiders, even to herself when she came out of it like a dream. It was beautiful, this place they walked through, she described it as they walked: the divan a shining lake, and beside it, the almirah growing the branches of an incredible tree thick with flowers they feasted on. She watched the Brother reach up to pluck the flowers, unable to reach—she lifted him to the higher boughs where the flowers grew thickly, smelling of rasmalai, and creamy—they tasted together. “It’s sweet!” said the Brother, licking his fingers. Sap ran down the branch: pure milk. They lost their human aspects and became wild things, crouching, snarling, living wildly but privately. They seemed almost not to be with each other, deep in this forest, so wreathed in their own imagination: she saw so many things and described them to him, narrating it like a story: the gods she saw and walked with, swimming with them, and dancing.
“A tiger,” said the Brother, pointing, “there—” and they followed it down the hill, until the Brother caught its neck in his arms and Vidya came astride it, lifted him up. They were not children anymore as they rode the tiger. Being alive together in the invisible world made them kings. And so steeped in each-other-ness that they would never be alone.
The Mother’s face, when she arrived, was flushed with heat. From the moment the screen door whined open on its hinges, they were children again, thrust back into the visible world. They knew better than to speak, just watching her. She drew a cup of water from the clay pot and drank it, and then another, with movements that were blurry and slightly uncontrolled. The Mother and her face were full into tomorrow, but she wore it differently—tomorrow was calm upon her. She offered no explanation of her whereabouts and was not asked to provide one. Instead she asked, “Have you done your work?”
“No,” Vidya answered. The tone of her voice had not been scolding, and this unnerved the girl.
“You’ll do it, won’t you?”
Vidya nodded.
“Tell me all your promises.”
She couldn’t remember.
“One,” said the Mother, “you promised to take care of your brother. Remember?”
“No. I promised to take care of you.”
“You promised to care for him like a mother.”
Instead of arguing, she nodded.
“Two, you promised to do your dance.”
The need for the promise had broken now, even as the promise held fast. She practiced every morning, though she was not improving. She could feel her limbs gaining some control but for all the control she developed, her body revealed infinite capacities for rebellion: her limbs were not strong enough to hold their stillness, her fingers too inflexible to curl slightly up as she held them in their kissing mudra, her feet unable to separate the beats fully into distinct phrases. She was still at the back of the class, but knew enough Hindi now that the Mother didn’t need to translate, and no longer sat in the room to watch her. She walked home by herself.
“Three?”
She had promised Suneeta to help with her maths, in exchange Suneeta would do her sewing. She didn’t tell this to the Mother. Two promises seemed terrible enough. “Only two.”
“What happens when you break a promise?”
“Punishment.”
“That’s right,” said the Mother. “Punishment from god. Come, let’s rest.”
“Rest?”
The Mother was already unrolling the bedtime mats, pulling the shutters hard across the window’s eyes. The Brother lay down and shut his eyes immediately, but Vidya lay down with her eyes open, looking at the Mother. The Mother, heedless, undressed in the room and stood nude for a moment near her astonished daughter, who looked at her: the gaunt body, the rough black hair of her sex, and her heavy breasts, loosed of their blouse, tear-shaped and capped in dark loose nipples. Even unbound, her grooved hair held the ancient structure of its braid. She disappeared into the washroom, then, she was clean, returned, dressing in her best sari—the best of the best, her wedding sari—the red border woven with true gold. Late afternoon—with the windows closed the room was filling with a brown heat. Was she beautiful, the Mother? Was she beautiful? Yes, she was very beautiful, she was immense and terrible in her beauty, braiding her wet hair with its new strands of white. Yes, very beautiful, fragrant in that shabby apartment in that strange dark light. Her hands made careful movements, straightening the flat and touching all its objects with admiring fingers. Vidya kept still so as to not banish the beauty. Tomorrow was here but she was not ready.
“Are you tired?”
She didn’t move.
“I went to the sea today.”
“The sea?”
“I wanted to go in. But I didn’t. I wanted to swim.”
“Why?”
“The water is so warm, Vidya.”
“Can you swim?”
“We never went to see beautiful things. To go look at beautiful things just because they were beautiful.”
“Dance is beautiful.”
“Yes,” she said, “dance is beautiful. Sleep now. Shut your eyes.”
The woman of tomorrow had a gentle voice. Vidya kept her eyes open. The heat pressed on her. There was the sound of the Brother breathing, breathing easily, already asleep. How can you sleep if tomorrow is here?
“Will you stay here?” she asked like a baby would. This mother said yes. “Until you fall asleep.”
“Then I’ll never fall asleep.”
The Mother smiled. Her face was large in the girl’s vision, shining in the dark. She smelled of beige soap and again of sweat, not bitterly of it, only honestly, and the coconut hair oil that glistened in her part. She could watch the face forever, the face that looked back at her, without anger or indifference, reaching out toward her from the hard eyes, the eyes that had
softened in the dim light until they were as young as a girl’s eyes, they were Vidya’s own eyes looking out from the Mother’s face with lightness and openness. The eyes of today and tomorrow both.
But the body—was slipping—into the heat—slipping, as the eyes grew heavy, and the thoughts started running—and she was on a wide, flat, hot, blank plane—running—and she tried to lift her eyes and open her body—but she could feel it separate from the dream body, which ran forward—heedless—and tripped and fell down a well—and shouted—
Mother!
II
Were you always “I”? For there was a day I arrived to myself, when I became I. And when I arrived into that moment I remembered, dimly, that there had been several before it, each preceding time more distant, more eerily felt, for I could not remember the circumstances, only the barest trace of feeling, like the perfume of a person who has just stepped off the lift. I am speaking abstractly, perhaps because as a dancer I have little faith in words to convey the meaning the body so effortlessly conveys. Perhaps you have never arrived to yourself, perhaps you have always remained “she,” looking out of your eyes at the world you know exists outside you, whose lights and shapes and sounds and smells and colors create specific but random configurations that only appear to be stories, stories happening outside you and only seeming to happen to you. More likely, you have never needed to arrive to yourself, you have always been “I”; the story that organized itself had you as its protagonist, your remembered moments a strong, smooth, infinite bridge, the small and large humiliations of bullies and your own mistakes and the warm hours of pride and pleasure serving to polish and strengthen it, so you are able to walk across this bridge of self untroubled through all of your days.
I know this: one minute I was a girl dancing, a girl who watched carefully through her own eyes the world outside them, glancing down at the position of her hands, focusing all her effort on the movement of her hands and her feet both at once: impossible: the hands moved up and down as though gathering flowers, and the troublesome feet just managed to ride on the edge of their rhythm without falling out of place: then, suddenly, the feet began to gather the rhythm into them, to understand it, and the world flared open. The feet danced themselves: no, I danced them. The practice, the care, the worry, the observation, fell away and I felt my soul stretching taut in my body, or expanding within it, I smelled the sweat of myself through my cotton and thought mine; I felt my soul or my awareness driving through me, through my hands and eyes and most powerfully through the violent cadence of my feet, each moving separately from the other, leaping away from me even as my body remained on earth. It was through this “I” that the room remade itself in wild clarity: I was in it, smelling its thick stinking air, dancing along with the other girls even as I fell away from them, moving deeper into my body as the world became sharper, Amrita the closest, whose feet were a little off, though her arms moved precisely, and the light fell across her oiled hair and the line-true part in her scalp, and now the music, the tabla and the bol, spoken by my teacher, but which felt spoken by my own body: so many times had I practiced this composition that my body knew the next phrase before it was uttered, and sought to create it unbidden by the conscious part that commanded it. When Sita stood in the fire, perhaps it felt like this, a wild, nearly unbearable pleasure in which a voice shouted—I! and the voice, both spoken and heard by the body, answered again I! and the body heard I! and I! and I!
When the composition ended I was glad because I don’t think I could have borne it for any longer. I squatted at the back of the room and closed my eyes: still burning. Until my heart slowed I was frightened. Perhaps if you lived your whole life in “I” it didn’t burst out of you in one scary dazzle. Slowly the I was receding: I felt it leaving, the aperture of the world closing slowly. Class had ended and I went outside. What had happened, was I mad? I was not dying, I thought. I was still there. But I could see myself, dimly, still through the eyes of myself: the body of a girl, sweating, drenched, foolish in the broad heat, grateful for a breeze when it came and slowed her heart back to rest.
This girl, the Vidya, back inside to gather her things, could feel her teacher looking. She had been dancing in a group of twelve other girls and forgot she herself could be observed as the world gaped open, she still in her amateur back-of-the-class position. “Come here, child,” said Teacherji and Vidya came with the reluctance of one about to be scolded. Teacherji lifted Vidya’s chin and examined her with the steady concentration of a jeweler.
“What happened today?”
“Today? Nothing, Teacherji.” Her heart was beating. Something had been seen, a private thing. But private was not the same as shameful: not always, maybe.
“Do you practice?”
“Yes.”
“When.”
“Every morning, Teacherji. And I do the steps in my mind when I walk home so I remember them. And on the bus. And sometimes . . .”
“Sometimes?”
“At school.”
“Ah,” said the teacher. “That’s very good. But don’t let it get in the way of your studies or your mother won’t let you come here.” The teacher’s face faltered with her mistake, naming the gone Mother. “Your father won’t let you come here.”
“Yes, teacher. Teacherji.”
“Are you vegetarian?”
“Yes, Teacherji.”
“No eggs?”
“No.”
“You need to eat more. You have to be strong to dance well. Can you get some eggs?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with them.”
“Crack them open and put them in sabzi.” Then she asked. “Tell me, do you love god?”
Vidya hesitated, wanting but unwilling to lie. It was the teacher, exacting. The voice that spoke the bols spoke them loosely, almost as a question. And the voice that asked the questions was the opposite, spoke the questions as a command.
“No,” said Vidya, waiting for her slap. The teacher looked at her, but not with reproach. There was no emotion on the teacher’s face that she didn’t will there: you danced long enough and your body became yours: a hard-won instrument. Severe.
“I want you to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays also.”
“I can’t—”
“I’ll talk to him.” Him meaning her father, or god. Or both. She knelt down to take her blessing from the dust of Teacherji’s elegant feet. Walked home. It was always dusk when she left and the dusk today deepened against the sea. She watched it for a moment pausing on the pedestrian bridge to see the queen’s necklace glinting against the salty neck, diamonds in one direction, rubies in the other. Farther down, curved out of sight, was the nightly carnival at Chowpatty Beach, where you could buy bhel puri and stand eating it from its newspaper cone: the slight taste of ink, released from the paper by moisture and oil, was an essential ingredient, as was the salt air you ate it in, sharpening the other flavors and the alternately crunchy and soft textures as you stood in the dirty sand watching the stupid children who wasted their parents’ money on rides upon the rickety Ferris wheel. She had wanted a ride, once. And the Brother too, before he had learned disdain from her. She could remember how he had reached for the wheel with his two small hands, with his whole body, and she had leaned down to him and said, “We’re not like those empty-heads, are we?” And he had nodded, watching her, pressing the desire out. Who are we like then? he could have asked, but didn’t. No one, she might have said. Or, each other.
Something had happened today. Now the feeling was gone, it was like remembering pain—impossible—just the trace of it left, some feeling of alteration. Now she felt calm enough to wonder at it. What had happened? Would she miss it, now that she had tasted it? Had she been marked, changed? Would it come back? If so, how would she bear it? And yet the thought that she could return now, just like this, with only the memory of the change, seemed less bearable still. She wanted to be marked, altered, changed. Split open.
&nb
sp; Downstairs, in the courtyard, it was the Brother who ran now between the wickets, staining his bare legs with dust. If she could not join him, well then, she didn’t want to: her wants had changed direction. Skinny now, the Brother, he lengthened from baby to boy, she loved him most watching him run the courtyard or off the bus from school. Where this joy came from she had no idea. The fact he didn’t have to manage the washing or prepare dinner each night, she guessed. But watch him run. He was all legs and arms whirling in dust, a smile parting his lips as he ran, quite fast, unconscious like a dog with a dog’s subtle grace. She left the window. The bai who came to chop the vegetables was finished; Vidya squatted over the cookstove to make the rotis. Never quite as thin as the Mother’s golden circles puffed so elegantly with heat, and she had never shown Vidya the correct proportion of the spices: Father Sir said so sometimes, but ate, the Brother ate, not complaining, then she ate last, in the kitchen, after everything was put away.
After dinner she switched from wife to daughter doing her studies, her books and notebooks outspread on the floor. Father Sir, no matter how exhausted, sat down with them both to practice their sums, she correcting the Brother’s work, and then Father Sir correcting her maths before she turned it in the next morning. He was intolerant of error, but he was not, in this context, severe. He wanted them to understand not just the sum that lay before them but the animating concept behind the sum, behind the formula: he wanted their sums to be immaculate for it was an essential punctuation, but he was less concerned with the right answer than how they arrived there. When he spoke, his voice lost its commanding tone, it rose and fell in an almost musical cadence, and behind his beady glasses his eyes lifted: she loved him, this version, and what he offered her, which was to structure her mind pristinely, to make it logical and unceasing, the way dance made her feet logical and unceasing. The world could be perfect: it was her mind and her body that failed its perfection.